Man this thread is old. Like an old man. Libre office and Caliga are much bettter then Open office.

iTunes to Songbird: If you’re accustomed to the equation where “Apple + iPod + iTunes” equals a ton of money, then you might consider a switch to Songbird. Songbird is an open source player and a platform committed to “playing the music you want + from the sites you want + on the devices you want.” Songbird thereby challenges the conventions of discovery, purchase, consumption and organization of music on the Internet.

Ok this just grinds my gears as they forgot that songbird is also a decent web browser to and that is the ONLY REASONi use it. And by the way, where are the open source games?! I did not see any witch means that the list is Biast and not complete. That it write I am going there. Now Micropalus is a good game but LinCity is complete crap. I mean what is with all the Russian vocabulary and we still don't have any more then one simcity clone.

I think this is by far and above the best MS Office alternative. I've not had the slightest trouble importing Office 2010/2013 documents or spreadsheets. Colors, formatting and fonts all look almost the same. Formulas and graphs all seem to work too (I have a few complex ones).

Kingsoft as Word replacement; I've tried the free version, which prolly lacks all the features of the paid-for one. It performs well & handles all MS Word files, so maybe worth downloading for that. But it falls behind Open Office in not recognizing & incorporating a scanner feature, or 'odt' files. Since that meant it was of limited use for my purposes, I rather lost interest after that, so I don't know if it can save graphics as 'jpeg' files (Word refuses), or how it fares with 'pdf' files.

Personally, I find MS Word the best. Linux would make bigger inroads in the business/academic markets if it introed its own version, were that feasible. Word's domination is from its near universal use, making the exchange of docs simpler - little file converting & staff training needed.

Open Office is acceptable, but no match for Word beyond simple text-bashing. Eg., commands ribbon cannot be customized, & any doc saved in non-odt form tends to have corrupted formatting when re-opened later. This seems to be when graphics & text are mixed.

Hm, thats interesting. I've had no problems using LibreOffice (the one that comes pre-installed with Mint) and MS Word, once I got my partition mounted. Sure a few formatting issues within the document itself (font, spacing, etc.) are inconvienent, but I've never had issues with corrupted files.

I wouldn't go as far to say that MS word is the king of office suites. Statistically speaking it does well, but other than that, I don't know... I guess everyone is entitled to their opinion (at least in Canada) so if you like using MS word then by all means, use it and enjoy!

I just prefer using free software. After all, Linux is free...

Running on ancient hardware and a now super-charged linux only laptop. :DWindows free since September 4th, 2014 @ 19:47 Mountain standard time.

Would be nice to see a small collection of the "must have" utilities. Like on the windows side: Beyond Compare, Treesize Pro, WinRAR, CPU-Z, MP3 Tag & Rename, TextPad is a decent (paid for) editor on windows, but gedit is not bad... not to mention all the cool Piriform apps... sure, there's 12 command-line options in linux to do CPU-z, but really, the strength is in the "all-in-one" convenient place. And why compare MS Office to Open Office? I really think that LibreOffice > OpenOffice. I also laughed when I saw the Windows Media Player -> VLC. That really should be "VLC -> VLC"

Also, I'd put in Moneydance (but it's not free) over gnuCash (free) any day, but I know the point was "free vs. paid". It just does a whole lot more (and is windows/mac/linux); the only downside is java-based = crappy fonts. Still, this begs the question: I know a lot (most?) linux users like "free" software; I think this list should also have proprietary / paid-for linux software as well.

The list does need to be updated; or better yet and in true linux fashion, let's create our own (re-invent the wheel)

I'v just found a complete replacement for PDF manipulation programs like Adobe Acrobat, Infix PDFeditor, NitroPDF, etc. (with text/image modification tools). This is MasterPDFeditor. It can be downloaded from the developer's site. Is like a "portable" app, the folder can be moved in any place. Very good program.PDFs can be modified also with Inkscape and Libreoffice Draw. PDFmod has also some useful tools.